The Financial Times reports on the financial woes of the leadership we are now pretending is the Libyan government:

But the cash-strapped de-facto government is struggling to balance the provision of domestic services with the war effort. Amid rising discontent over its performance, the delivery of everything from electricity to banking is vital to underpin the rebels’ legitimacy, which has wobbled since the mysterious assassination of their military commander last month. Late on Monday, Mustafa Abdel Jalil, the NTC leader, ordered a cabinet reshuffle, in an effort to damp tensions over the killing of General Abdel Fattah Younes.

Almost a month since the U.S. recognized the Transitional National Council as the “legitimate governing authority” in Libya, the expected unfreezing of Libyan state assets has still not happened, and it will not be happening for some time. Josh Rogin gives us the latest update from the State Department:

“We had difficult internal U.S. procedures with regard to the banking situation, et cetera,” State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said at Tuesday’s briefing. “And we’re also in an environment where U.N. Security Council Resolution 1970 put some restrictions on what we can do. So we’re continuing to work internally on various routes to get some of this money to the TNC.”

There is probably only about $150 to $200 million of frozen Qaddafi money in U.S. banks, but even that money is affected by the U.N. sanctions. The rest of the $30 billion is held outside the U.S. banking system. What’s more, Nuland said that the United States wants to make sure that the money “if given, is used properly and for humanitarian purposes.”

The Libyan rebel leadership is in an unusually difficult position. It doesn’t really have any legitimacy, so it needs funds to shore up its control and provide some basic services, and the funds it could use to that end are unavailable because of the sanctions that were imposed originally to penalize Gaddafi for cracking down on the uprising. Some of the foreign governments that recognize it as the Libyan government have provided some funds, but none of the TNC’s sponsors is interested in fully subsidizing the rebel leadership between now and whenever it finally gains access to Libyan state assets.